These are the reasons most people abandon their personal weblog or never start one. But we all come across interesting tidbits online every day that we want to remember and share - links, photos, videos, even that side-splitting IM session you had with your co-worker. A new blog format, called a "tumblelog," is a no-hassle, no-writing-required way to share those bits and maintain a personal site with the least possible commitment.

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A new service called Tumblr can publish your tumblelog with minimal setup and for free. Let's take a closer look at how to publish a tumblelog with Tumblr.

What's a tumblelog?

The Wikipedia explains that a tumblelog is a variation on traditional blogging that favors very short, mixed media posts with little or no commentary. In essence it's a lightning-fast way to publish the stuff you run across on the web every day, and the layout includes large text, photos, links, and video frames. A really great example of a well-done tumblelog is projectionist.

Six post types

The neatest thing about tumblelogs is that unlike regular blogging - which confronts you with a large, empty textarea to type your thoughts into - there are 6 distinct types of posts that have their own visual format: a "traditional" blog post, a photo, a quote, a single link, a conversational transcript, and a video.

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When you create a new post inside Tumblr, choose which type it will be and enter it accordingly.

Each post type gets a different look and feel once it's published. For example, quotes are in large type that pop off the page:

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Whereas dialogues are formatted much like an IM window:

Now, Tumblr does all that nice formatting for you, based on the post type you chose. For example, that conversation post was entered into Tumblr like this:

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Cool, huh?

Problem is, we're still clicking around and typing into web forms. After you set up your tumblelog, you want to post to it in a flash and move on. That's where the Tumblr bookmarklet comes in.

The instant-post bookmarklet

What's most useful about the "Share on Tumblr" bookmarklet is that depending on the page you're on, it automatically detects what it is you want to publish - a quote, a video or a photo, say. So if you're on Google Video, the bookmarklet sets up a video post. On Flickr? A photo post. Check out what the bookmarklet looks like when I hit it while watching this goofy Richard Stallman video:

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You can also change the post type using any of the tabs inside that window.

Less is more

Experienced bloggers looking for advanced, detailed CMS features in Tumblr will be disappointed. There are no comments, trackbacks or categories; there's no ability to change the timestamp on a post and no search capabilities. You can customize your tumblelog's template within Tumblr, and even map it to your own domain name, but you've got to have the CSS/HTML/DNS skillz to do so on your own. But the beauty of Tumblr is its simplicity; you spend no time futzing with CMS settings and very little time just posting stuff that's interesting to you.

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Even without that boring CMS functionality, Tumblr does offer a couple of interesting, advanced features: like the ability to automatically suck in feeds from other sites, like Flickr or Twitter, as well as the ability to post photos and text directly from your cell phone.

Most of all, a tumblelog presents a fun editorial challenge: to say something with the least amount of words possible. The blogger becomes pure editor, just picking and choosing the most interesting tidbits on the web. I've also found that the better tumblelogs mix up post types for a nice visual layout.

More tumblelogs

Check out other tumblelogs in action at the Tumblr Radar. (Unforgivably shameless plug: I've been tumbling over at Scribbling.net.)

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As you can see, I'm pretty enamored with the tumblelog format and loving Tumblr for making it happen. What's your take on tumbling? Let us know in the comments.

Gina Trapani, the editor of Lifehacker, is crazy about tumblelogs. Her weekly feature, Geek to Live, appears every Wednesday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Geek to Live feed to get new installments in your newsreader.